Battle of Hope
|} The Battle of Hope was the first battle in the campaign to reclaim the United States from the zombies. It was fought 7 years after the disastrous Battle of Yonkers. The entire battle was actually an experiment to test the effectiveness of the new model army that had been trained in the years since zombies became the dominant life form on the planet outside of the Safe Zones. Thus, the actual location of Hope, New Mexico had no actual strategic value: the entire point was picking a town named "Hope" for the battle that would take the fight to the zombies. The entire operational plan was actually to march a large army group beyond the Rocky Mountains defensive line, engage and destroy a disproportionately high number of zombies, then retreat back after proving that the new tactics worked. Improvement from Yonkers The new tactics and equipment developed during the past seven years were atonement for the mistakes made at the Battle of Yonkers. Training At Yonkers, soldiers inexperienced at facing the undead panicked. Furthermore, while soldiers at Yonkers were told that the only way to kill a zombie is with a head shot, for years they'd been trained to shoot for the chest of a human target because it is the hardest to miss, and it was difficult to adjust to shooting a smaller target. In the years leading up to the Battle of Hope, the new model army trained extensively. They were trained to use the new Standard Infantry Rifle (or SIR, usually pronounced "sir" with affection) to consistently make accurate long-distance head shots. In addition, captured and chained zombies were used on training courses in extensive combat drilling to remove the soldiers' panic about facing them. On the unit-level, the plan was to "out-Z the Z". Soldiers were taught to fire with mechanical precision in a steady stream of head shots that might last for hours, alternating with a partner: one soldiers fires while the other re-loads. Equipment Unlike Yonkers, the new army was not made to wear heavy bio-hazard MOPP gear. Nor did uniforms have any camouflage: concealment serves no point against zombies, because they don't use guns and "if they're close enough to bite you they can already smell you". Ultimately, camouflage would result in more friendly fire than anything: thus uniforms were now navy blue (resembling police SWAT team uniforms). More importantly, the new uniforms were made of a special fabric weave, still a government secret, that consists of many interwoven metal fibers; this makes it difficult for zombies to bite through, though it still allows the soldier's body to breathe and not become overheated. The new primary firearm of the U.S. Armed Forces, the "gun that brought us back from the brink", was the Standard Infantry Rifle - reverently called the "SIR". Fully automatic weapons were proven during the interim period to be wasteful against zombies in regards to ammo conservation, as only consistent headshots make every round of ammunition count. Earlier engagements used "scythe theory" - a notion that large amounts of enfiliade fire from full-auto weapons such as machineguns could simply cause ranks of zombies to fall down dead like a scythe cutting through wheat; in practice, it only breaks the spine and midsection of the zombies, causing them to become "crawlers" - zombies without legs, who will keep crawling to their prey with their hands and bite at the ankles. The new tactics employed against the zombies revolved around the philosophy of "one shot, one kill", with soldiers training with metronomes to keep a low but constant rate of fire designed to get the most out of both accuracy and speed. SIR rifles are semi-automatic, ensuring soldiers cannot panic and attempt a "scythe attack", and the SIR was designed first and foremost for accuracy, range, and durability, sacrificing rate of fire. This served to make soldiers focus on shooting one zombie at a time with a headshot, without wasting bullets. Further, the SIR was so extraordinarily accurate that former infantryman Todd Wainio claimed his SIR had never ''jammed, even after being hauled in dirt and mud for weeks. Special incendiary rounds (Propelled Incendiary Explosive or PIE rounds, also known as "cherry pies") were developed, to aid in decontamination by burning most of the zombie's brain matter when it was shot the first time. These rounds create an extremely small explosion about the size of a basketball, ensuring a headshot would destroy the brain. For close range work, the United States Marines devised the Standard Infantry Entrenchment Tool as a new replacement shovel and emergency melee weapon. The SIET was usually called the "Lobotomizer", or "Lobo" for short. A sort of a cross between a shovel and an axe, it can be used for digging entrenchments, but was really designed as an efficient axe for cleaving into zombie skulls at close range. Further, they were made out of metal from scrapped cars, making them extraordinarily cheap to mass produce. The top brass were stationed in special 50-foot high towers so as to give them a commanding view of the entire battlefield, even over the piled bodies of the slain zombies. Vehicles The US military had to force itself to face the reality that a single jet dropping a bomb on a zombie horde, was actually far less efficient than sending in an equivalent force of infantry: the most efficient method of killing an infantry-based enemy (zombies) is with other infantry. If it cost $1 million to fuel, maintain, and arm a plane, $1 million worth of fully equipped infantry could actually kill far more zombies. Thus, most of the US Air Force was mothballed, left in cold storage hangars. Remaining flights were just used for supply runs - never against zombies. A major reason Yonkers was such a disaster was that the US military commanders in charge at the time were trying to use outdated Cold War tactics, centered around attacking Russian tanks, against what was essentially a human wave attack. Further, Yonkers was meant to be a showcase of the "technological edge" that they had over the zombies; unfortunately, most "advanced weapons" are anti-vehicle weapons, centered around destroying tanks and planes, not large numbers of enemy infantry. The result: The nation watched with utter horror as on national television, an M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank, arguably the most sophisticated combat vehcile in the world, plated in top-secret armor 2.5 times thicker than steel, fired a massive 120mm cannon, launching top secret depleted uranium Sabot armor-piercing rounds, into a crowd of a million zombies, to seemingly no effect. Seven years later, all of these "pinnacles of US military might" were now rotting on a desolate abandoned battlefield in upstate New York, in the heart of thousands of miles of zombie-infested territory. In the Battle of Hope, vehicles were only used in a support role: just Humvees to transport boxes of ammunition and other supplies for the infantry, some equipped with special frontal attachments to essentially turn it into a bulldozer. Deployment At Yonkers, soldiers were ordered to dig foxholes (a form of protection against small-arms and artillery fire, neither of which is used by zombies) and play a secondary role while the tanks "handled" the zombies. At the Battle of Hope, infantry were deployed in two lines (one fires while one reloads) and in a box formation centered around the ammo-carrying humvees much like the Raj-Singh manuever; the celebrated Indian commander, General Raj-Singh, had eventually lost with that strategy only because his men had run out of ammo to continue fighting. Infantry at Yonkers had likewise run out of ammunition, because they weren't expected to do much "real" fighting. Now, more than enough ammunition and supplies for the infantry was carried in the trucks, and distributed regularly. In addition to this strategy, grid-pattern distance markers were set out in advance, and soldiers were ordered to wait to shoot zombies only when they crossed a precise distance, instead of shooting randomly. This quickly made all of the zombies pile up in an ever-growing wall of corpses, slowing the advancement of the following zombies that had to crawl over them. Several soldiers were assigned as "Sandlers": basically water boys to make sure soldiers had water or replaced them if they were overheating or tiring (many soldiers at Yonkers collapsed from exhaustion). Army physicians and psychologists were also on hand to monitor the progress and alertness of the soliders, ordering them to rest if they show signs of strain or fatigue, and replacing them with a fresh infantryman. Psychology The biggest factor of Yonkers failure was arguably the loss of morale: After living through three months of the The Great Panic, forced to labor for hours in heavy body armor and MOPP gear on a hot summer day, watching all of their "Wonder Weapons" fail horribly on a relentless army of walking dead, and last of all watching their comrades being ripped apart and eaten alive on Land Warrior video feed inside their very helmest, the soliders had lost their will to fight in spades. This time around, the U.S. Military was not taking chances of that happening again. Every platoon now had a specialized mental health doctor assigned to it. These doctors had spent years of individual evaluation and examination, and knew the complete history, personality, behavior and personal limits of every single man and woman assigned to them. During the battle, the doctors would go back and forth observing the soldiers in their unit, watching their performances for subtle indications of physical, mental, or emotional stress and fatigue. Just as a soldier was about to reach the limit where his or her battle effectiveness would begin to drop, their doctor (and as Wainio said, they somehow ‘’always’’ knew) would tap that individual on the shoulder for a “Fiver”. The soldier’s position on the firing line would then be replaced by a Sandler, while the soldier took a five-to-ten minute break. They could stretch, rest, drink, grab a bite of ration, use the latrine, then return to his spot on the frontline. These short breaks made a world of difference, both to individual morale and health, and to both individual and group combat effectiveness. These doctors would go on with their units on the Road to New York, determining when the stress had proven too much for some and removing those before they became a risk to those around them. The Battle Before the Army even arrived, special K-9 squads had been deployed around the town of Hope to distract the undead until the Infantry could set up positions and distance markers. The dogs would be trained to lure the horde to the opposite side of the town, then once preperations were complete, would recieve orders via radios in their collars from their handlers to make a dash towards the Army's front line, with the Gs in slow pursuit. The battle itself lasted for hours, from one day through the night and then to dawn the next morning. Sound-speakers played the song "The Trooper" by Iron Maiden loudly to lure zombies from all across the countryside via the chain swarm effect; the moans of these zombies attracted more zombies, and so on, until all of the zombies from a large swath of the region were descending on Hope, an estimated 10,000 undead. The music served the secondary purpose of getting the soliders "pumped" and ready for battle, increasing morale. Eventually, the Zombies themselves began showing up in full view. Then waiting till they came into ranges where successful head shots were assured, the soldiers opened fire with deadly accuracy. Round after round slammed into the G's ranks dropping every line. The box formation meant that the soldiers were not outflanked, and large red-colored floodlights were deployed to make sure they could keep fighting even through the night as more zombies kept flowing in from surrounding areas. The PIE rounds used by soldiers gave off a distinctive glow with a successful headshot when exposed to the red floodlights. It was slow going, but eventually, the flow of zombies started trickling off, and eventually dwindled to nothing. The soldiers found themselves surrounded on all sides by a massive wall of dead Gs twenty feet high in some places, and they had to use special bulldozer humvees to clear a path out. During the dawn hours, infantry then moved into the mountain of zombies to finish off survivors, who were simply pinned down under other zombies, using their Lobotomizers. Not a single human had been lost in the battle, and ten thousand zombies had been destroyed. As the sun rose, a landscape filled with piles of bodies reverberated with the sound of zombie skulls being cracked in with lobotomizers, and renewed confidence that ''humans, not zombies, were once again the dominant race on Earth. Category:World War Z